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Monday, 14 November 2011

I have a new shiny

So, and to follow up on the comments from my last post, I informed Beloved that the Abacus could no longer be tolerated. It was no longer fit for purpose. I had to restart it 4 or 5 times just to make it work, half the links and menus were borked – it was giving me grey hairs every time I touched it. I use the computer far too much – for work, for blogging, for shopping, for gaming – to reasonably tolerate another 2 months with the computer in this condition. I’d actually find it easier to do without a phone - any phone – for 2 months than to do without a computer.

I actually had a huge long speech that didn’t seem to be getting anywhere (I think I have trained him to ignore eloquence because he usually loses). Eventually I resorted to grabbing him, chanting “please please please please” and not letting go until he agreed. Yes it’s not the most advanced or intelligent of debate methods but if it works I’m all for it. I also threatened not to feed him and promised various things that shall remain undisclosed.

Eventually Beloved relented on the (usually sensible) October 20th rule so he could play magnanimous lover rather than nagged and beaten loser. So we went out together and bought a shiny.

It’s official, I could never have kids now because all my love has been invested in this computer. I have none to spare for children. *drools all over the shiny* It works! It actually works. A computer that works. *hugs it pathetically*

Of course, all weekend was spent extracting as much of the data I could from the old wreck (poor Abacus, he served me well for many a year, but alas, its time is now over. It deserves a Viking funeral). Anticipating that this was going to be a fight and not nearly as simple as plugging in my terabit external drive I set aside all weekend for it (I did put things in holding mode though so hopefully there were no disasters).

And yes, there are problems. See, Abacus had a partitioned drive. I’m not sure why, I think it came that way or Beloved did it. So it had C:/ and D:/ (roughly equal sizes) and E:/ (recovery files). Now, I had a virus not long ago that masqueraded as a windows computer fixer. When I removed it it left me with a PC that was wrecked. The desktop was invisible – never again could I save a file to it. My start menu links all failed and half my program files just didn’t work any more. After that I did a system restore to fix another problem (the fact it kept freezing and looking for boot discs on start up) and then… D:/ disappeared. Just gone. The partition is gone, the letter assigned to the DVD drive and all the data lurking on D:/? Inaccessible.

This vexes me.

So, my old tower is sat next to me, taunting me “there is still info in here you neeeeed and you can’t get it! You can’t get it!” And it knows, it knows, that I’m going to have to plug it in again some time to try and get at that partition. *curses angrily*

Of course, I’ve also got to set up everything on the new computer which is taking a while. Not helped by the fact I don’t remember one single password so I’m having to reset them all. Oh and I just had to get through a captcha that used pi – the Greek letter pi. I have no idea how to type that. Also, yes dear websites, I realise that to have a strong password you should have caps and small letters and numbers that are non-sequential. I know, however I can’t be arsed and, frankly, if some of you are hacked I really really don’t care. Now quit wittering at me and let me enter my easily-remembered password that breaks all the rules.

But back to the shiny. It is shiny! And it works! And it gave me an excuse to use a new mouse with an actual wire (I hated that wireless mouse. Hated it hated it hated it) and a keyboard that isn’t all gungy (but the buttons are recessed which is cool and quieter typing but is taking some getting used to) and I looooves it I do.

Expect me to spend a few days getting used to everything and drooling over things. Soooo shiny. And it’s quiet! It makes so much less noise, the abacus sounded like a helicopter taking off!

Oh and I have like a gazillion emails. More. Ye gods 4 days away(ish) and my inbox explodes